Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Staple Crop Is Fueling The Climate Crisis

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Mitti Labs

• Startup 2: Rize

• What Else Did I Publish Recently

This Staple Crop Is Enabling The Climate Crisis

For billions of people, this is a staple crop. It feeds more than half the world.

If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re talking about rice.

If you’ve ever read about (or seen) rice fields, you’ve probably noticed they’re flooded. That’s why they’re also known as rice paddies (a paddy is a flooded, enclosed field).

While these flooded soils are great for growing rice, they also create ideal conditions for microbes that release greenhouse gases, making rice fields (and rice) a growing driver of climate change.

And since billions of people eat rice, and that number is growing, two things are happening:

• The rice cultivation areas are increasing

• In the existing fields, more intensive practices are used to increase the yield

Farmers are also using more synthetic fertilizers, and even organic ones like straw and manure. They’re fitting more crops into the same field and growing them closer together. On top of this, rising global temperatures are increasing microbial activity, which thrives in these rice fields.

Many farmers also leave rice stalks in the field and plow them into the soil to improve soil fertility. But this increases the organic matter in the soil, which microbes then decompose — creating more methane emissions.

All of these activities compound into higher emissions.

So, if we know the problem, why aren’t we moving straight to solutions? Well, it’s complicated.

There are ways to reduce these emissions:

• Reducing fertilizer use and residue application

• Allowing dry periods instead of keeping the fields flooded throughout

• Allowing only moderate amounts of straw and other crop residue in the field

• Converting crop residue into biochar before mixing it into flooded soils. It can help stabilize soil carbon and reduce methane emissions.

But none of these solutions is a silver bullet. Many have limits, and they also depend on the region where rice is grown.

For instance, using moderate amounts of straw is OK, but too much can increase methane emissions and lead to carbon loss from the soil. Similarly, while reducing tillage seems like a good option, a recent study found it does not always minimize net emissions in flooded systems.

There are brands helping farmers find the right strategy so they can continue feeding the world while reducing associated emissions. I have covered two of them below.

But before that, it’s time to test your knowledge (or deduction power):

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Mitti Labs

Let’s work together… Mitti Labs works directly with rice farmers in India to reduce methane emissions without affecting yields. It implements techniques like direct-seeded rice (DSR) — planting seeds directly in fields that don’t need to stay flooded, rather than transplanting seedlings, and alternate wetting and drying (AWD), where fields are periodically allowed to dry instead of remaining continuously submerged.

Can’t measure, can’t reduce… To measure and verify emissions from a field and the reductions achieved through its interventions, the company uses satellite imagery and radar. This technology can penetrate clouds, plants, water, and soil to reveal what’s happening underground, where microbes produce methane. Its AI models are trained on satellite data and extensive field studies conducted by its agents.

Why should a farmer sign up… Verified emissions reductions are converted into methane-reduction carbon credits. Mitti tracks these in its software, takes a percentage of credit sales, and passes the remainder on to farmers and the community.

Check out Mitti Labs

Rize

Different geographies… Rize works with rice farmers in Vietnam and Indonesia, helping them implement alternate wetting and drying (AWD) across their fields. As fields are allowed to alternately dry, farmers can save energy and water. This lowers costs, making it an appealing option—and it reduces methane emissions too.

Going beyond emissions… Most of the farmers Rize works with are smallholder farmers. Before each season, they buy essential inputs like rice seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides on loans with 10–15% interest. Rize leverages its relationships with farmers to procure these inputs in bulk and sell them at a lower rate.

There’s more… Rize also works with farmers to offer a range of rice by-products, such as husk pellets, rejected rice, rice bran, and rice flour. It has also developed a rice carbon credit program. The carbon impacts of its partners are recorded and verified through a Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system that strictly complies with Gold Standard Methodology.

Check out Rize

What Else Did I Publish Recently

• 15 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Buy Something on Sale

• 5 Ways to Defeat Influencer-Driven Impulse Buys

• What Locals Wish Tourists Knew Before Booking a Trip

Quiz answer: Bangladesh

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• For Brands May Come and Brands May Go

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Beni

• Startup 2: Treet

• Startup 3: tooused

For Brands May Come and Brands May Go

A few days ago, the iconic ethical fashion brand Everlane was sold to Shein.

Business acquisitions happen all the time, so what’s new here?

Well, for starters, Everlane was a poster child of sustainable fashion. A direct-to-consumer basics brand that ran on the principles of sustainability and transparency.

It started in the early 2010s, and back then, it spoke about things like the cost of making a piece of clothing, moving garments through the supply chain with limited plastic use, and improving the quality of its workers' lives.

15-20 years ago, these things were unheard of. So Everlane was clearly ahead of its time.

Due to rising debt and other internal issues, it has recently been sold to Shein, the ultra-fast fashion giant that has more than 500,000 products on its website and is known to have unethical practices in its factories.

It’s a setback for everyone who built the brand or supported it by investing, working for it, or buying its products.

We don’t know how Everlane would operate under Shein, and if it would be able to hold its values under the new management.

But there’s one thing that we are sure of: its basics were designed to be worn for years.

So even if the brand may not last, the products that were made under its strong and ethical values will. And you can still get these products secondhand (in certain parts of the world). That’s something that is in our control, isn’t it?

For this week, I have 3 brands that are making it easy for clothes to have multiple lives.

But before we get into those brands, here is the quiz for this week:

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Beni

The first brand that I want to cover today is Beni, which makes buying secondhand clothes as easy as buying new ones. They have a browser extension. If installed, when you are shopping for something new, it pops up and shows secondhand alternatives for the same product. Check the image below.

They also have an app where you can find a large assortment of secondhand clothes.

And lastly, they have launched Beni Lens, a visual search engine for secondhand fashion. Think of it like Google Lens. You like a dress, you take a screenshot of it, and then paste it into Beni Lens. It searches through its vast assortment of secondhand products to help you get the same product, but secondhand.

It also allows you to set alerts for your preferred product, and it keeps you updated if there are any new secondhand listings. Impressive, right?

Check out Beni

Treet

Now we saw how Beni is making secondhand shopping easier for consumers. Treet is working on the brand side, making it easier for them to set up secondhand shops for their own clothes.

Most brands have a return option these days for new clothes. If the returned clothes are slightly used or torn, brands don’t put them up for sale again. That way, they lose the revenue. Also, a lot of these brands want to sell these clothes secondhand, but they don’t have the time and resources to set up a secondhand store.

Treet solves this problem through a plug-and-play model.

It offers these 4 solutions to brands:

Brands can choose one or more of them, and in a few clicks, their secondhand store is ready.

Check out Treet

tooused

On the consumer side, tooused in India has come up with an interesting model. It sends you a Give Back Bag to your doorstep. You can then pack your clothes at your own pace.

The team collects the bag and does a 12-point quality inspection. In return, it gives you Tooused credits that you can redeem for Brand Vouchers or daily essentials like groceries, baby care, and household supplies.

The clothes are redistributed to thrift retailers, giving them a second life. If they cannot be resold, they are sent to certified textile recyclers.

Check out tooused

Further Reads

If you are interested in reading more about secondhand shopping, here are a few articles that I have written:

• The Outdoor Gear You Should Always Buy Secondhand

• Is It Okay to Thrift Fast Fashion?

• 10 Thrift Store Treasures for Your Home

• Overwhelmed by Thrifting? Try These 5 Tips

• The Complete Guide to Thrifting Furniture

Quiz answer: Allbirds

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Oil is Not the Only Thing Impacted By War

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Upside Robotics

• Startup 2: Black Bull Biochar

• Startup 3: Net Zero Nitrogen

Oil is Not the Only Thing Impacted By War

Since March 2026, the war in the Middle East has thrown many things into chaos, including the global fertilizer markets.

Here’s why that matters: half of the food we eat depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers like NPK and Urea.

These fertilizers are added to soil primarily as they provide essential nitrogen, a key component for amino acids, proteins, and chlorophyll. It boosts crop growth and increases agricultural yields.

Now, the key suppliers of these fertilizers, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iran, and the UAE, are constrained because the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

The Strait alone normally carries a third of the global fertilizer trade.

Also, fertilizers are made using energy-intensive industrial processes that run on natural gas, which, btw, has also been impacted by the war.

On top of that, we’re also in the middle of the spring planting season, when farmers need the fertilizer.

As a result, the world is looking at a food shortage.

The World Food Programme has warned that global food systems are under severe strain, with more than 360 million people facing acute food insecurity in 2026 and tens of millions at risk of famine.

As with everything else in the world, the poorest will feel the impact first, but eventually everyone will.

So what do we do?

First, a caveat: no single fix solves this. If you want a gut-check on how this feels on the ground, listen (not read) to NPR’s recent edition on small-scale farmers in India hanging by a thread because of the Iran war: Hanging by a thread.

Of course, the best solutions are to move away from these inorganic fertilizers altogether and start using organic ones. But that won’t happen overnight.

So while we keep working on that, we also have to look at technologies that reduce the need for inorganic fertilizers while maintaining the yield. More on them below but before that, here’s the quiz of the week:

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Upside Robotics

Farmers often apply fertilizer in a single, uniform pass each season. This approach is inefficient and mistimed:

• Only ~30% gets taken up by the crop, so most is wasted.

• Growers have to front-load fertilizer even though crops need nutrients throughout the season.

• The result is higher costs, more runoff and emissions, and less precise crop nutrition.

Upside Robotics is solving that with these lightweight (150 lbs), solar-powered autonomous robots that live in the field. On top of that is their software that runs on proprietary algorithms. It deciphers when and how much fertilizer the plants need using weather and soil data.

Instead of one big tractor doing a single uniform pass, these bots:

• Navigate between crop rows with precision, just 22 inches wide to fit a 30-inch row gap

• Apply fertilizer directly at the root level, in small, precise doses

• Use AI algorithms that combine live soil, weather, and crop-stage data to decide when and how much to apply per plant

• Recharge and refill automatically at a solar-powered base station

• Operate 24/7, covering up to 100 acres per week

As a result:

• 70% less nitrogen is used

• Up to $150 is saved per acre, per season

• Farmers have healthier soil

  Check out Upside Robotics

Black Bull Biochar

Every year, millions of tons of agricultural waste are burned or left to rot, which releases carbon into the atmosphere and adds to air pollution.

At the same time:

• Our soils are losing nutrients

• Farmers are using more chemical fertilizers

• Carbon levels in the atmosphere keep rising

Black Bull Biochar is solving both problems.

• It takes the agricultural waste.

• Heats it in a low-oxygen environment.

• Turns it into biochar, a stable, carbon-rich material.

This biochar (with stored carbon) is put back into the soil. This process locks carbon into a solid form, instead of letting it escape into the air as CO₂.

Biochar also acts like a sponge in the soil, which holds nutrients and improves soil structure. As a result, farmers need fewer chemical inputs.

Check out Black Bull Biochar

Net Zero Nitrogen

As we saw earlier, nitrogen is essential for crop growth. The higher the soil nitrogen, the better the crop growth, and that’s why nitrogen fertilizers are added to the soil.

But unfortunately, they are not good for the planet. 5% of greenhouse gas emissions come from them. They also lead to polluted waterways & loss of biodiversity.

UK-based Net Zero Nitrogen has an alternative.

• It has developed a biomaterial that comes as a freeze-dried powder.

• It gets mixed with water and applied directly to the seeds.

• This allows the seeds to get nitrogen directly from the air.

This reduces their dependence on the nitrogen in the soil, and thus the need for nitrogen fertilizers

A highly effective, natural, cheaper alternative that doesn’t require farmers to change anything and can prevent a billion tonnes of CO2 annually.

Check out Net Zero Nitrogen

Quiz answer: China

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Live Music has a Waste Problem

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Energy Floors

• Startup 2: Greenlit

• Startup 3: POWR2

Live Music has a Waste Problem

If you've ever screamed your lungs out at a concert, you know there's nothing quite like it.

The lights, the crowd, your favorite artist, a few hundred feet away — it’s the kind of joy that’s hard to put into words. But behind the scenes, that joy comes with a cost most of us never see.

One of the world’s biggest pop stars, Billie Eilish, saw it. And she decided to do something about it.

Her recent 14-month Hit Me Hard and Soft tour spanned 15 countries and four continents, and it’s quietly become a blueprint for what touring can look like when artists actually care:

• Reusable water bottles.

• Merch made from recycled materials. ( I think this can be avoided altogether)

• Plant-based food at venues (a hit in San Jose, where SAP Center kept the vegan menu after she left).

• A Google Maps partnership to help fans get to shows on public transit - genius!

• Signage at every stop reminds concertgoers that small choices add up.

The impact: over 103,000 water bottles kept out of landfills, 27 food drives, and millions raised for climate causes.

You can read the full impact report here.

It matters because concerts have a footprint. The average three-day festival churns out roughly 500 tons of CO₂, about 5 kg per attendee, per day. Idling buses, generators, and single-use everything add up to that number.

And some brands are helping artists and their teams reduce the impact of their concerts.

But before we discuss them, here’s the quiz of the week:

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Energy Floors

Energy Floors, a Dutch startup, is turning something as ordinary as a dance step into clean energy. They design smart, interactive flooring for events, retail spaces, and mobility hubs. These floors quietly convert movement into electricity, data, and a visible reminder that sustainability can also be a little bit fun.

• Their flagship product is the Kinetic Dancefloor, and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Every jump, sway, and stomp from the crowd gets converted into electricity in real time, powering the floor’s own LED lights or any of its on-site add-ons.

• It has already shown up in some pretty iconic places, from the World Science Festival in Times Square to the European Jaguar XE launch party, turning sustainability from a talking point into something a crowd can literally feel under their feet.

Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour, where the band set out to cut greenhouse gas emissions, also used them. Energy Floors built custom Energy Centres at each venue: 44 kinetic dancefloor tiles arranged in a circle, plus 15 stationary bikes, so fans could dance and pedal their way into powering the show.

The tiles, topped with recycled plastic to survive a four-year world tour, also gathered data on how much energy is being produced. On the in-venue and online dashboards, fans could see which song generated the most power.

Check Out Energy Floors

Greenlit

Greenlit, an India-based startup, is taking on the unglamorous side of live music: the generators, the plastic, the waste, the logistics. They offer end-to-end sustainability services for concerts and festivals, quietly handling the parts of a show that audiences never see, so the parts they come for can carry on with a much lighter footprint.

Their work starts long before the lights come on.

• Greenlit runs a detailed carbon and waste audit to map an event’s emission sources and waste points, then designs a custom strategy covering packaging, power, hydration, and logistics.

• On show day, their team manages the on-ground execution which involves setting up hydration stations, waste zones, and clean power systems behind the scenes.

• Once the crowd has gone home, they deliver an impact report that quantifies emissions avoided and waste diverted, turning sustainability claims into something measurable.

The pieces themselves are practical and built for scale.

• Diesel generators get swapped for silent, zero-emission battery energy storage systems that keep stages powered without the noise or the fumes.

• Single-use plastics are replaced with reusable cups, cutlery, and artist-catering packaging.

• Hydration stations and, more recently, branded water carts, keep crowds refilled without a mountain of bottles.

• On the logistics side, EVs, smarter route planning, and shared transport networks move artists, equipment, and crew with a fraction of the usual fuel.

Their work has already shown up behind some of the biggest tours to land in India, including shows by Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran.

Check out Greenlit

POWR2

POWR2, a US-based clean energy startup, is rethinking the loudest, smelliest part of any live show: the generator. They build hybrid power systems that pair battery energy storage with a backup generator in a single trailered unit, giving events, concerts, and festivals a way to keep the lights, lasers, and subwoofers on without the constant rumble of diesel running through the night.

At the heart of it is the POWRBANK Hybrid System, which uses the battery as the primary power source and only fires up the generator when it’s needed.

• That alone is enough to cut fuel use, slash emissions by up to 80%, and bring the noise floor of a backstage area down to something close to quiet.

• The whole setup is managed through their built-in ADVANTAGE energy management system, which lets crews monitor and control the generator, battery, and connected loads remotely, in real time, from anywhere.

• It also means far less maintenance than traditional generators demand: no oil changes mid-show, no refueling runs between sets.

The result is a main stage powered without the usual fuel burn, the usual maintenance, or the usual noise. It set a new benchmark for sustainability at festival scale, and shows that clean power doesn’t have to mean compromised power.

Check out POWR2

Quiz answer: Taylor Swift

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Metal Quietly Runs Our Lives

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Transition Metal Solutions

• Startup 2: Recupere Metals

• Startup 3: NextOre

This Metal Quietly Runs Our Lives

Remember copper from high school chemistry? That reddish-orange metal your teacher probably passed around as “the one that’s really good at conducting electricity”? Turns out, that unassuming little thing is quietly running almost everything around us right now, and the world is on the verge of running out of it.

The metal you never think about

Copper is in the wires powering our homes, the cables carrying electricity across cities, the motors inside our fridges, and the transformers keeping the grid alive.

It shows up in data centers that handle every AI search, in the factories that build everything from iPhones to fighter jets, and in pretty much anything that needs to move electricity from one place to another.

Why this omnipresence? Well, because nothing really matches its combination of conductivity, durability, and flexibility.

But here’s the thing: copper is only mined in a handful of countries, but it’s used everywhere. That makes it an easy target for tariffs, export bans, and trade fights. And when the politics get messy, prices go haywire.

Demand is going through the roof

Right now, we want more copper than ever. Three big reasons:

• Renewable energy. A solar or wind farm needs 2.5 to 7 times more copper than a gas or coal plant to produce the same amount of power. All those panels and turbines need long stretches of wiring to gather the electricity and bring it to one point. More renewables, more copper. Doesn’t mean we should stop the transition, btw!

• Electric vehicles. A regular car uses around 20 kg of copper. An EV uses over 50 kg. It’s there in the motor, the battery, the inverter, the wiring, and the charging equipment. As buses and trucks start going electric too, that number only climbs. Again, that transition is required!

• AI and data centers. This might be the biggest one yet. AI runs on computing, computing runs on data centers, and data centers are basically giant rooms of servers, cooling systems, power distribution units, and transformers, all of which need copper. We can probably cut some slack (or copper) here!

The supply can’t keep up

You’d think we’d just dig up more. Sure, there’s plenty of copper in the ground. The problem isn’t that it’s rare (yet); it’s that getting it out is difficult.

Permits take forever. The industry is struggling to find enough workers. And building a brand new mine? That’s a 20 to 30-year project, during which costs often balloon.

Then there are environmental hazards such as clearing large tracts of land, displacing tribes, and using limited water resources to run these mines.

So demand is skyrocketing, supply is stuck in slow motion, and the gap keeps widening.

What about replacements?

There are a few options, but they are not promising for now:

• Aluminum can step in for some jobs (like overhead power lines), but not most of them. Even in the best case, it could only cover about 2% of what copper currently does.

• Fiber optics is great at carrying data, better than copper, actually, but it can’t carry power. So they’re a partial fix at best.

• Newer materials like ultra-conductive aluminum, carbon nanotubes, and niobium phosphide show real promise. But they’re still deep in lab-coat territory, years away from showing up at scale.

So, for now, the world still needs copper. A lot of it. But we also need smarter ways to mine it, recycle it, and stretch every kilogram. Some brands are taking this challenge on.

But before we discuss them, here’s the quiz of the week:

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Transition Metal Solutions

Transition Metal Solutions thinks it can wring a lot more copper out of the same rock by helping the microbes that do the heavy lifting.

Microbes have long been essential to heap leaching, freeing copper from minerals so it can be refined. Transition Metal Solutions argues that the industry has been optimizing the wrong way, by isolating or engineering a few promising strains, growing them up, and then dumping them onto ore heaps.

The startup says that in reality, those microbes are not lone heroes. They live in complex communities where different organisms support one another, and boosting one strain only goes so far.

So Transition’s approach is to lift the whole community with mostly inorganic additives already present at many sites.

Even accounting for some drop-off outside the lab, it expects the impact to be meaningful. While traditional methods recover roughly 30% to 60% of the copper in ore, Transition aims for 50% to 70%, and possibly more.

Check out Transition Metal Solutions

Recupere Metals

Recupere Metals is scaling an innovation that produces high-conductivity copper electrical wire from 100% recycled feedstock.

By removing the need for smelting (extracting copper from ore) and refining (separating impure copper from pure copper), the process enables a smarter, more efficient route to producing copper winding wire while materially reducing GHG emissions.

Targeting the $30bn winding wire market, Recupere Metals will supply 100% recycled copper electrical winding wires to EV motor manufacturers, wind turbine manufacturers, and electrical component manufacturers.

Check Out Recupere Metals

NextOre

NextOre helps mines upgrade ore before it reaches the processing plant, so less rock is hauled, crushed, and treated for the same amount of metal.

With conventional mining, most material pulled out of the ground gets sent through crushers and grinders, even though a large share is waste rock. That means operators spend a lot of energy and money breaking down and processing material that never turns into saleable metal, while also creating more waste and using more water.

NextOre tackles this upstream with its Magnetic Resonance Analyser (MRA), a sensor adapted from medical MRI technology by Australia’s CSIRO. As ore moves past the scanner, the system measures it in real time and automatically kicks out low-grade material using a pneumatic reject.

The difference is simple: instead of processing everything and hoping the valuable part shows up later, NextOre sorts early, lifting head grade while cutting waste, water, and energy use, and helping mines stay productive even as ore grades decline.

Check out NextOre

Quiz answer: Chile

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Boson White Water

• Startup 2: Epic CleanTec

• Startup 3: Membrion

The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt

But they aren’t talking about money

In January 2026, the United Nations released a report that used a word we usually hear in boardrooms and courtrooms: bankruptcy.

But they weren’t talking about money. They were talking about water.

The UN’s researchers said that the world has entered what they’re calling Global Water Bankruptcy.

That means we’ve been pulling water out of rivers, lakes, and underground reserves faster than nature can put it back. And in many places, the damage is now beyond full recovery.

Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure.

• Around 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water.

• 3.5 billion lack proper sanitation.

• And about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month every year.

More than half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s. Major rivers are failing to reach the sea. And 70% of the world’s major aquifers, the underground reserves we depend on, are declining.

Think of it like a bank account. You keep withdrawing, but the deposits have slowed to a trickle. The account still shows a balance, so everything looks fine. Until it doesn’t. That’s water bankruptcy.

Now, Let’s Talk About AI and Water

Here’s something most of us (including me) don’t think about when they ask AI a question or generate an image: it takes water to do that.

Every time you use an AI tool, the request goes to a data center, a massive building packed with thousands of computer chips, all running at full speed, all day, every day. That generates a lot of heat.

And to keep those chips from melting down, most data centers pump water through cooling systems. Lots of water.

How much? A single 1-megawatt data center can use around 26 million litres of water a year just for cooling.

Scale that up to a 30-megawatt facility, and you’re looking at hundreds of millions of litres, comparable to the yearly water use of tens of thousands of households.

Some companies are experimenting with seawater or closed-loop recycling systems, but fresh water is still the standard in most facilities. And the demand is only growing.

The global AI boom means more data centers, bigger data centers, and more water. Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The Driest Places Are Building the Most Data Centers

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Gulf states are racing to become AI and cloud hubs. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, they’re all building data centers at speed.

MENA holds about 6.3% of the world’s population but only 1.4% of its renewable freshwater. It’s the most water-stressed region on the planet. Eleven of the 17 most water-stressed countries globally are in the MENA region.

Because there’s so little natural freshwater, countries like Kuwait (90%), Oman (86%), and Saudi Arabia (70%) rely heavily on desalination — turning seawater into drinking water.

That process is energy-intensive and can harm marine ecosystems through brine discharge. So every extra unit of water needed to cool AI infrastructure could also mean more emissions and more damage to coastlines.

In India, the picture is just as concerning. Cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore are the centres of India’s data centre boom, the same cities already dealing with water shortages, contaminated supply, and failing infrastructure.

India’s data center market is projected to exceed $100 billion by next year. Google, OpenAI, and others are pouring in gigawatts of capacity.

But these cities can barely keep taps running as it is.

A Note on Hypocrisy (Mine, Specifically)

I should be upfront about something. I use AI every day. I mostly use it to draft and organise my work.

Some of the writing for this very edition was done with AI tools. So, writing about how AI is making the water crisis worse while actively using it? Yeah, that’s a contradiction I’m sitting with.

But I don’t think the answer is to pretend it’s not happening or to swear off AI entirely.

AI is genuinely useful. It’s helping people do more with less, and it’s accelerating work in fields like climate science, healthcare, and clean energy.

One of my favorite stories was this: A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog – an oncologist urges caution

Anyway, the problem isn’t AI itself. The problem is that the infrastructure behind AI, the data centers, the cooling systems, the energy grids, is being scaled up without enough thought about what it costs the places where it’s built.

So this isn’t an anti-AI newsletter. It’s a “let’s be honest about what’s happening” newsletter.

We can use AI and also demand that the companies building it take responsibility for its real-world footprint. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

And honestly, if you’re reading a newsletter about sustainability in 2026, you’re probably already someone who holds more than one truth at a time.

So What Can Actually Be Done?

That’s what the rest of this edition is about. Because while the problem is real and urgent, people are working on it. Brands building solutions for water treatment, conservation, and access, not in some distant future, but right now.

Let’s meet them, but before we do that, see if you can estimate this number below👇

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

According to the UN report mentioned above, women play a central role in household water provision, especially in rural areas. Instead of spending time on education, leisure, or income-generating activities, women and girls across the world collectively spend X hours every day collecting water.

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Cities are running out of water, and we are draining groundwater faster than it can naturally recharge. That is why solutions that create new supply matter.

Boson White Water is doing that by turning treated sewage water into potable water through an 11-stage purification process, where each stage removes a different class of contaminants.

Instead of asking buildings to buy more tanker water, their system can be leased and installed in:

• 🏘️ Apartments

• 🏢 Offices

• 🛒 Shopping malls

When the lease costs less than the purchased water, the business case is straightforward.

And the impact is bigger than one building: it reduces pressure on freshwater sources and gives local aquifers a chance to recover.

Check out Boson White Water

Boson Whitewater tackles supply at the building level. Epic Cleantec takes a similar approach but goes further inside the building itself, treating and recycling wastewater on-site so it never has to leave.

Their onsite systems:

• Capture greywater and blackwater

• Treat it to high safety standards

• Reuse it for toilet flushing, cooling towers, and irrigation

The result is straightforward: buildings can cut potable water use by up to 90% for non-drinking purposes.

That means:

• Lower water bills

• Less strain on city water and sewer systems

• Greater resilience during droughts

• A smaller environmental footprint

And they go one step further.

Epic Cleantec also transforms solid waste into nutrient-rich soil products, helping close the loop beyond water reuse.

Check out Epic Cleantec

Where Boson and Epic Cleantec focus on residential and commercial buildings, Membrion applies the same principle, treat and reuse at the source, to industrial facilities, where water is often heavily contaminated with metals and chemicals.

Their on-site systems use:

• Electrical fields

• Ceramic desalination membranes

• A silica-gel-derived ceramic material (the same base material found in moisture-absorbing packets, engineered for water treatment)

The result is straightforward: facilities can recover usable water at the source while reducing disposal burdens.

That means:

• Lower operating costs

• Better compliance with stricter discharge and disposal regulations

• Less polluted water is released into the environment

Industrial sites depend on water to run day-to-day operations. But in many facilities, the loop looks like this:

• Clean water goes in

• Contaminated, metal-laden wastewater comes out

• And it gets discarded instead of being reused

That is why solutions that treat and recycle water on-site matter.

Check Out Membrion

Some Other Notable Water Solutions

1. Mimbly — A device that attaches to any washing machine to filter microplastics and reuse wash water, reducing water waste and plastic pollution.

2. High Sierra Showerheads — Engineered a single-nozzle showerhead that uses up to 40% less water without sacrificing pressure or comfort.

3. NetworkOcean — Builds underwater data centres cooled by natural ocean currents, eliminating freshwater consumption for AI infrastructure cooling.

Quiz answer: 250,000,000 hours

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you in two weeks :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• The Chain Reaction of the War

• Earplugs Grown from Mushrooms

• Bio-Based Materials, Starting with the Diaper

• Turning Fallen Leaves into Plates That Disappear

The Chain Reaction of the War

One of the many things that happened as a result of the Iran War was the increase in the prices of plastic. Plastic, like many other materials, is made from petrochemicals. So when the Strait of Hormuz was choked, and the petrochemical supply got disrupted, it also impacted the plastic supply chain.

Let’s get a little technical for a moment.

Plastic production depends on petrochemicals, which come from crude oil and natural gas. It starts with extracting and refining crude oil, which produces key feedstocks like naphtha, a lightweight hydrocarbon.

Next, naphtha is “cracked” in high-temperature units into smaller molecules like ethylene and propylene. Those are the basic building blocks for the two most common plastics: polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

This matters because the Middle East, led by Saudi Arabia, supplies over 40% of global polyethylene exports. In effect, it is a major warehouse for the world’s plastics.

So when something goes wrong upstream, like the Strait of Hormuz getting choked during the Iran war, the shock travels quickly down the line.

Now we all hope that the ceasefire is respected and it continues, and we see more peaceful days. But the scenario also shows us how these black swan events can impact our daily lives. This is also a great time to push sustainable alternatives to plastics, ones that are not impacted by the movement of container ships across the globe. And here are 3 brands that are doing that.

Earplugs Grown from Mushrooms

The earplugs that you pick up at concerts, airports, factories, and pharmacies are made from PVC, a petroleum-based plastic. The world manufactures 40 billion of them every year, enough to wrap around the Earth nearly 100 times. And because they’re single-use, almost all of them end up in landfills.

GOB has created the world’s first 100% mycelium earplugs. It’s made entirely from the root structure of mushrooms. No plastic. No fossil fuels. No harmful chemicals.

How it works

GOB partners with Forager (by Ecovative), which grows mycelium foam on agricultural waste. The process can produce 3 million square feet of material per year on just one acre of land. The mycelium is shaped into earplugs that offer up to 20dB of noise protection with balanced acoustic dampening, meaning they block harmful noise while maintaining sound clarity.

The material has memory-foam-like properties, so it conforms to your ear shape without the pressure or irritation you get from traditional plugs.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

Unlike PVC earplugs, GOB’s product is 100% home-compostable. When you’re done, it breaks down into soil nutrients — no landfill, no microplastics, no centuries-long decomposition. And because it’s grown from fungi, not extracted from oil, it is completely decoupled from the petrochemical supply chain that just got disrupted by the Strait of Hormuz.

Check out GOB

Bio-Based Materials, Starting with the Diaper

A disposable diaper is mostly plastic. The core ingredient that makes diapers absorbent is a material called superabsorbent polymers, or SAPs. They’re made from petroleum-derived plastics. Over 27 billion soiled diapers end up in U.S. landfills every year, where they take over 500 years to decompose. And as they break down, they release microplastics into the soil and water.

The global hygiene market that depends on these materials is valued at over $155 billion. All of it is running on the same petrochemical supply chain that just got choked by the Strait of Hormuz.

ZymoChem has built something that could change that. They’ve developed BAYSE™ Bio-SAP, a 100% bio-based and fully biodegradable superabsorbent polymer. Same performance. No petroleum.

How it works

ZymoChem uses a proprietary Carbon Conserving (C2) fermentation process. Think of it like brewing beer, but instead of making alcohol, their engineered microbes convert renewable corn sugar into high-performance materials, with near-zero CO₂ emissions during fermentation. Their process achieves yields up to 50% higher than other bio-manufacturing methods, which is what makes it cost-competitive with fossil-based SAPs.

The result is a drop-in replacement. That means diaper manufacturers don’t need to redesign their production lines. BAYSE™ slots right into existing factory setups, a detail that matters a lot when you’re trying to get big brands to switch.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

Unlike petroleum SAPs, BAYSE™ is biodegradable and microplastic-free. It breaks down naturally instead of sitting in a landfill for centuries. And because it’s made from corn sugar, not crude oil, it doesn’t depend on naphtha shipments passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

In March 2026, ZymoChem announced that BAYSE™ became the first bio-based superabsorbent to match and outperform petroleum-based materials in third-party testing. In consumer trials, 88% of parents liked the absorbency, and 92% said they’d buy a diaper made with it.

Check out ZymoChem

Turning Fallen Leaves into Plates That Disappear

Single-use plastic plates and cutlery are everywhere. Weddings, street food stalls, office parties, festivals, and food delivery. Most of them are used for a few minutes. But they stay on the planet for hundreds of years. India alone generates millions of tonnes of plastic waste every year, and a big chunk of it comes from these single-use items. Even “paper plates” are often coated with plastic, which means they can’t be composted easily.

Agrileaf is solving this with something surprisingly simple: fallen areca palm leaves. Instead of cutting down trees, they collect naturally fallen leaves from farms. No plastic. No glue. No synthetic additives. Just leaves.

How it works

The fallen areca leaves are cleaned and heat-pressed into plates, bowls, and takeaway containers, shaped without chemicals, coatings, or adhesives. The factory, located in the arecanut-growing region of Karnataka, India, is operated by rural women using a fully organic approach. For their takeaway containers, Agrileaf uses a bio-based coating and heat sealing to make them leak-proof, tamper-proof, and resistant to sogginess for hours, engineered to work like modern food packaging without the plastic.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

After use, Agrileaf’s products can be composted at home or buried in soil, where they break down naturally. No landfill, no microplastics, no centuries-long decomposition. And because the raw material is agricultural residue that would otherwise be burned or discarded, the entire supply chain is local and renewable, completely independent of the petrochemical infrastructure that just got disrupted.

Check out Agrileaf

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you in two weeks :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Blade-Made

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers

India produces 30 million tonnes of salt each year. 80% of it comes from the salt flats in the western state of Gujarat. The industry informally employs women to run this.

There are around 40000 women salt farmers, who use highly polluting diesel generators to pump brine to the surface from underground reservoirs.

Now diesel is expensive and polluting. In the 8 months of the year when they harvest salt, each woman uses approximately 1300 litres of diesel. This costs them 60% of their salaries, too.

A project led by Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has replaced 7000 of these diesel generators with solar panels. SEWA is India’s largest union of poor women working in the informal sector.

These women not only use this solar power, but under a cooperative, they maintain it and even sell the extra power generated in the off-season (4 months) back to the grid.

The result:

• Their incomes have gone up by 600%.

• It saves 18900 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Blade-Made

Wind energy generation is on the rise. And that’s good news since we are moving to cleaner energy. But it’s also causing another stream of problems.

2 years ago, I actually wrote an article on that: Can Wind Turbines be Recycled?

Now, wind turbine blades don’t last forever. They have to be replaced every 20-25 years. These blades are made of glass/carbon fiber reinforced plastics (GRP). And we haven’t really figured out how to recycle them.

So instead of tossing them in landfills, Blade-Made is reusing them.

It’s converting them into outdoor furniture, facades, playgrounds, shelters, and street signs

A viable solution that gives these blades a new life until we find viable recycling methods.

Check out Blade-Made

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Sea Forest: Makes a livestock feed additive using seaweed to slash livestock’s methane emissions.

🇫🇷 nextProtein: Insect-based protein for animal feed stocks.

🇪🇸 Voltrac: Automated electric tractor, built for hard work and harsher conditions.

🇿🇦 Plentify: Optimises home energy and load management.

🇩🇰 Nordic Salt Cycle: Recovers critical & strategic minerals with a low-cost, flexible & scalable molten salt process.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⛏️ No more digging…Contrary to its neighboring country, Brazil, Colombia has decided not to approve any new oil or large-scale mining projects in its Amazon biome, which covers 42% of the nation’s land. There were a total of 43 oil blocks and 286 mining requests.

🤝🏽 Sustainable promises…Seychelles’ president-elect, Patrick Herminie, who came to power in the Indian Ocean nation on 26 October, has halted the construction of a controversial Qatari-funded luxury resort on an environmentally sensitive island.

🌞 Roof them up… Starting in November 2025, a national law in South Korea requires all parking lots with more than 80 spaces to install solar canopies and carports. The law applies to new as well as existing parking lots.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

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Quiz answer: Brazil, which is also the world’s top coffee producer

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Using Old EV Batteries to Power Street Lights

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: ReMadrass

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Using Old EV Batteries to Power Street Lights

EVs are growing in popularity, and that’s a great thing. Their overall pollution is less than traditional gas cars, and there are no tailpipe emissions. Now, as we know, EVs run on batteries that can last for a couple of years before they no longer serve the EVs, even though they are not fully discharged.

The most convenient way to get rid of these half-used batteries would be to dump them in a landfill and forget about them and their environmental impact.

But we are beyond a point where we can do convenient things at the cost of the planet.

Jeju province in South Korea has realized this as well. It has started a pilot program to repurpose these EV batteries and use them for agricultural machinery and energy storage systems.

In fact, the program extends to 100 devices like farm equipment, transport robots, and streetlights that do not require a fully charged battery and can be powered by these repurposed batteries. The only condition is that these batteries should have at least 60% capacity.

These batteries also contain critical metals and minerals like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese that have to be mined. Since they are mined, you can imagine the social and environmental impacts associated with them.

So South Korea is also working to raise its recycling rate for important minerals to 20% by 2030, anticipating an increase in retired EV batteries by the same year.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: reMadrass

When Lennert Hug found out that in Norway alone (with a population of 5.6 million), 750,000 mattresses are discarded annually, he knew something had to be done.

Lennert estimated that each mattress weighs an average of 21 kg, which results in an emission of 75 kg of CO2.

With around 3 million mattresses discarded in the Nordic region, that results in over 50,000 tons of waste, and almost 250,000 tons of CO2 emitted!

Lennert and team are solving this problem in Norway through their venture, ReMadrass (Madrass is a mattress in Norwegian). The first solution they offer is reusing existing mattresses.

• With partners like IKEA, they take used mattresses to their factories, inspect them, clean them using UV radiation, and a disinfecting shower.

• These mattresses are then packed and labeled with information sheets about the process they have undergone at ReMadrass.

• They are then sent back to the warehouses for sale and a further life.

The brand is also working to repair and resell mattresses that do not pass quality control for reuse.

• They will take in mattresses with minor defects, such as stains, broken zippers, or damaged covers.

• They will then replace the broken parts, like a torn cover, and send it back for reuse and sale, instead of sending it to the local recycling station.

For end-of-life mattresses that cannot be reused, ReMadrass is working on dismantling them, sorting different fractions, and delivering them for recycling locally. The foam from the mattress will be sent to a newly developed recycling factory for processing, production, and reuse.

All of this will ensure that mattresses stay out of landfills and we use as few materials as possible!

Check out ReMadrass

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇫🇷 Neo Trucks: Turns old diesel trucks into EVs by retrofitting them with an electric motor and a battery pack.

🇬🇧 Altilium: Extracting critical minerals from old EV batteries so that we don’t have to mine them anymore.

🇸🇽 Overstory: Uses AI-powered intelligence to help electric utilities cut the offending greenery back before it causes power outages or wildfires.

🇺🇸 Stony Creek Colors: Replacing harmful, synthetic colorants in our clothes with 100% traceable plant-based dyes.

🇳🇴 Flocean: On a mission to deliver affordable freshwater by desalination of deep ocean water.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

👕 Has someone worn it before?... Secondhand sales of clothes are growing faster than the new ones, and they are expected to hit $317 billion by 2028. While this is mostly supported by tariffs and inflation, and secondhand sales are still a tiny proportion of the overall fashion industry, I will take this as a win.

💪🏽 Still going strong… While the noise out there may say otherwise, a Harvard Business Review analysis of 75 global companies found that 53% are holding steady on sustainability commitments. What’s better is that 32% are even expanding on them, and just the remaining 8% are retreating.

💨 Let it blow… On November 11, 2025, Britain’s wind turbines set a new record, generating an impressive 22.7 gigawatts. That’s enough electricity to power 22 million homes!

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

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Quiz answer: Australia

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• How One Mom Turned Diapers Into Climate Solutions

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Resting Reef

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

How One Mom Turned Diapers Into Climate Solutions

When Carrie Pollak had her first child, she realized it was time for a career change. A former Amazon manager with a keen interest in sustainability, Carrie wanted to create a business that mattered.

That chance came in 2018 when she noticed a small cloth diaper service called Diaper Stork for sale in Seattle. Diaper Stork, at that time, was running a cloth diaper cleaning and subscription service in the Seattle area, where it picked up and washed the soiled linens weekly through a subscription service.

And if you are wondering why that is sustainable, well, Americans toss 20 billion disposable diapers into landfills every year. One disposable diaper can take up to 500 years to degrade, and just one child goes through roughly 6,000 before potty training.

While cloth diapers are the most sustainable option, Carrie quickly realized they only serve about five percent of families. Most parents still want convenience, so she set out to find a solution that could reduce the environmental footprint of disposables.

Since 2023, Diaper Stork has offered compostable diapers to customers. But since soiled diapers cannot be home composted and most industrial composting facilities don’t accept them for sanitary reasons, Diaper Stork is composting these diapers themselves.

They do it in a pilot facility using pyrolysis, a high-heat process that transforms soiled diapers into biochar. This charcoal-like material can fertilize soil, purify water, and even remove pollutants from stormwater. They have even partnered with a Seattle coffee roaster and add leftover coffee chaff from them to optimize the process.

Their pilot composting facility is compact, housed in a 40-foot shipping container, designed to sit close to customers and reduce hauling emissions.

Carrie’s team has also tackled regulatory hurdles, securing grants and working within state guidelines to ensure human waste can safely be composted.

Diaper Stork is redefining how parents think about diapers. What was once just a messy necessity is now part of a climate-positive cycle, proving that even the most unlikely waste can have a second life.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Resting Reef

This brand helps you convert your loved one’s ashes into a reef — a sustainable way to honor their life.

Burial these days is less accessible. Cemeteries are running out of plots. Land is being allocated to other developments, leaving cremation as a default funeral choice. Unfortunately, it’s a carbon-intensive activity and harms the environment.

Resting Reef provides a compassionate alternative. One that’s sustainable as well.

• It uses aquamation, an alkaline process for cremation.

• It combines ashes with crushed oyster shells and concrete.

• The end result is an oyster reef, which mimics the natural reefs.

• These are anchored to the seabed at a depth of about 10 metres.

The reefs play a critical role in regenerating marine growth. They also filter water and prevent coastal erosion.

But we have lost a lot of them due to human activities. This solution aims to revive them. While helping you commemorate a loved one 💚

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇬🇧 29acacia: Transforms agricultural waste into high-performance, low-impact textiles.

🇩🇰 Elby: Creates EV charging solutions for city apartments.

🇸🇪 Kurb: Makes resale more accessible by bringing all known resale platforms in one place.

🇬🇧 Future Greens: Generates green energy from the byproducts of the food industry.

🇸🇪 endre: Help grid operators make smarter decisions in the world of an uncertain, rapidly changing energy landscape.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⚓ Global High Seas Treaty Becomes Reality

After years of negotiation, the High Seas Treaty (aka the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction / BBNJ Agreement) has reached the required 60 ratifications and will formally enter into force in early 2026. This landmark agreement provides for legally binding protection and governance of marine biodiversity in international waters, enables the creation of marine protected areas, mandates environmental impact assessments, and promotes equitable access to marine genetic resources — all critical for ocean resilience and climate regulation.

📊 Brazil Turns Surplus Clean Energy into Opportunity

Brazil is seeing a boom in crypto mining powered by surplus renewable electricity — miners are negotiating to tap excess wind and solar energy that would otherwise go unused. These operations act as flexible “loads” that can absorb clean energy during off-peak periods, helping utilities monetize energy that might otherwise be curtailed.

🌊 Floating Solar in Indonesia Powers Clean Growth

In West Java, Indonesia has begun building a 92 MW floating solar plant on the Saguling Reservoir. Once operational (by November 2026), the plant will generate over 130 gigawatt-hours per year, cutting emissions by around 104,000 tons. This is part of Indonesia’s push to expand its renewable energy capacity to 42.6 GW by 2034, with solar contributing 17.1 GW.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

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Quiz answer: Yemen

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Turning Shipping Containers Into Shelters

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Mimbly

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Turning Shipping Containers Into Homes

In Phoenix, Arizona (US), temperatures can soar upto 122F (50C). The homeless people in the city don’t have a lot of avenues to protect themselves from this scorching heat.

So the city has come up with an innovative solution: turning shipping containers into homes.

It’s creating safe, indoor spaces for around 80 homeless.

• It has started with four 40-foot steel converted shipping containers.

• They are further split into private 5-by-8-foot rooms, with one resident per room and upto 20 people per container.

• All of the containers offer central air conditioning powered by solar energy.

The solar panels are placed on top of all these containers.

The facility also has:

• Shared restrooms

• Showers

• Laundry services

And they also help the residents with workforce development, life skills programming, and companion animal services.

An innovative solution that lies at the crossroads of social issues and climate change. Something that can also be replicated by other cities around the world. I am sure we don’t have a shortage of discarded shipping containers!

Also reminds me of one of our go-to places when we were in Toronto — STACKT Market, which was also made using shipping containers.

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Mimbly

Our clothes are mostly made of synthetic fibers. So when we wash them, they release microplastics — those tiny plastic particles that are less than 5mm in size!

This Swedish startup is tackling that problem.

Side note: If you would like to read about synthetics in our clothes, here are a few articles I’ve written on that:

• Why Are So Many Workout Clothes Made of Plastic?

• Workout Clothes And Microplastics: What You Need To Know

• What Are Synthetic Clothes and Are They Really That Bad?

So, textiles account for upto 35% of microplastic pollution. Swedish startup Mimbly has made a device called Mimbox that solves that problem. It can be attached to any washing machine.

It filters the water used in the washing cycle — trapping the microplastics and preventing them from entering the environment.

It then analyzes the wastewater and, if it’s clean enough, it’s disinfected, stored, and used again in the next washing cycle. This helps to cut down on the water waste.

It also delays this water from entering the external water treatment plants, helping cut down emissions generated from treating the water.

Zoom out…Although individuals can use Mimbox, I think commercial laundry owners like laundromats, hotels, and hospitals would benefit the most from this, helping them cut down water usage, microplastic waste, and emissions that come from treating wastewater.

Extra…Since we are talking about microplastics and laundry, here’s another piece that might help you (mostly, U.S.-focused, but you’d get some tips that you can implement at your place, anywhere in the world: Simple ways to eliminate microplastics from your laundry.

Check out Mimbly

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Banish: Tackles hard-to-recycle plastic and converts it into phone stands, earrings, and coaster packs.

🇺🇸 Mocean Energy: Uses wave energy to deliver clean, carbon-free, renewable energy.

🇫🇷 Pi POP: Instead of batteries, this e-bike uses supercapacitors - a more sustainable alternative.

🇺🇸 Replenysh: Makes it easier for brands to source and use recycled materials.

🇮🇳 PadCare: Makes sustainable periodcare products.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⚡ Renewable Energy Blows Away Fossil Fuels

According to recent UN reports, renewable energy has reached a "positive tipping point" with over 90% of new capacity being cheaper than fossil fuels. In 2024, global renewable energy capacity expanded by nearly 20% to 582 gigawatts, with almost all new power capacity worldwide coming from renewables and nearly three-quarters of electricity growth generated from wind, solar, and other green sources.

🪵 Sweden's Wooden Wonderland

Stockholm Wood City, Sweden's ambitious timber metropolis, is under construction ahead of schedule, with plans to deliver 2,000 sustainable homes by 2027. Beyond using wood from Sweden's abundant forests (70% woodland coverage), this eco-friendly development will feature bike storage, a subway station, rooftop gardens, solar panels, and even neighborhood beehives. According to research, this approach could significantly reduce carbon emissions while creating spaces that enhance human well-being.

🚺 Pink Power in Motion

The Pink City Rickshaw Co. in Jaipur, India, is transforming lives by training and employing 200 women from low-income households as drivers of eco-friendly electric rickshaws. This innovative initiative by ACCESS Development Services provides women with financial independence as equity holders in their own company while offering tourists unique, sustainable tours of the walled city's attractions in custom-designed pink e-rickshaws.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

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Quiz answer: Vienna, Austria

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Species Reappeared After a Century

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Pi-POP

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🦎 This Species Reappeared After a Century

Have you heard of geckos? I hadn’t, till I came across this piece. Geckos are small, carnivorous lizards, but they are slightly different from lizards — they have no eyelids and external ears like lizards.

Now in the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, Mares’s leaf-toed gecko (Phyllodactylus maresi) was thought to be extinct for a while. The only evidence of their presence was ancient subfossil bones dating back 5,700 to 8,540 years.

The reason for their extinction: invasive species of rats. Rats that were likely brought by pirates or whalers in the 17th or 18th centuries. These rats ate gecko eggs, disrupted nesting sites, and disturbed the entire ecosystem of the island.

In 2011, a few organizations came together to do something in this regard. Galápagos National Park, along with NGOs Island Conservation, the Charles Darwin Foundation, and The Raptor Center, launched a precision rodent eradication program. They targeted every invasive rat species.

Soon after the removal of rats, the ecosystem started reviving! The park rangers spotted a nocturnal gecko with distinctive leaf-shaped toe pads aka the Mares’s leaf-toed gecko.

People often imagine that nature may take a long time (20-50 years or more) to respond. But, when the correct pressures are removed, this is not always true,” Paula Castaño, Island Conservation’s impact program manager, told Mongabay in an email. “We often see these changes happening quickly, sometimes just in one or two years.

Shows how resilient nature is and how quickly it can take over. If we support it, it will revive quickly. If we don’t, it might take some time, but it will — the choice is ours!

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Pi-POP

This might look like a normal bike. But this is something between a bike and an e-bike!

Instead of batteries, this bike from French startup Pi-POP uses supercapacitors. These are quick-charging and long-lasting energy storage devices.

If you would like to dive deeper into the tech, here’s a relevant article.

This is how it works:

• Whenever you pedal on easy terrain, roll downhill, or brake, it captures energy and stores it electrostatically, not chemically.

• When you need more power, like climbing a hill or starting, that stored power kicks in.

A well-charged supercapacitor can handle about 50 m of elevation gain – enough for roughly 80 percent of European cities’ rides.

Unlike e-bikes, this one does not need any

• Rare-earth mining

• Lithium batteries

• Overnight charging.

The supercapacitor has a lifespan of 10 to 15 years vs the typical five to six years for typical lithium packs, making it a sustainable and economical urban mobility alternative!

Check out Pi-POP

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇨🇭 PeelPack: Uses potato peels to make plastic-free containers.

🇬🇧 Resting Reef: Helps you convert your loved one’s ashes into a reef.

🇮🇳 Bambrew: Harnesses the power of plant fibers and pulp to create packaging material.

🇩🇪 Soapbottle: Soap bars that are designed to last at least two months.

🇺🇸 Mycocycle: Uses fungi to transform construction waste into low-carbon raw materials.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Smart Data Centers on a Budget

Estonian researchers have created mini data centers by linking old smartphones together, costing just $9 per phone. This innovative approach could significantly reduce electronic waste from billions of discarded phones while decreasing the need for expensive, energy-intensive data centers.

Brewing a Greener Future

Heineken is cooling down its carbon footprint by heating up differently - replacing gas boilers with biomass, biogas, and solar-thermal systems across European breweries. Their Seville facility alone generates 68 MWh of stored heat, preventing 1,300+ metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

Duckweed Dives into Protein Market

Plantible Foods has launched its 100-acre Texas factory, "The Ranchito," now producing hundreds of metric tons of duckweed-based Rubi Protein. This nutrient-rich "water lentil" packs 40% protein with a nutty spinach flavor and might be the most abundant protein source on the planet.

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Quiz answer: 91%

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• They Wanted A Sustainable Wedding Card

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Roha Biotech

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

They Wanted A Sustainable Wedding Card

Back in 2016, Garima Capoor and Sumat Nanda were looking for a more sustainable wedding card. They wanted to avoid the typical "funky grand" wedding cards. Instead, they wanted something that could be enjoyed long after the wedding and would not end up in a landfill.

When they could not find anything, they decided to create their own, using seed paper — basic vegetable seeds embedded in handmade paper made from upcycled cotton scrap.

When the wedding guests started sharing the photos of the plants sprouting from their invitations, the couple knew that they were onto something. In 2018, they started Plantables with their first product, a plantable desk calendar.

Today, it offers a wide range of products, including notebooks, carry bags, and postcards, all of which are made from materials that grow into plants. To make these products, Plantables works with women from economically challenged backgrounds.

It was the first brand in India to introduce the concept of Plantable Rakhi (a Hindu Festival) in 2019. It also worked with brands like Guns N’ Roses and Coldplay during their India concert and made plantable guitar picks, made from basil seed embedded in upcycled cotton scrap paper and plantable tags, making sure every product creates a new life!

Check out Plantables

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Roha Biotech

Bubble wraps and packaging foams take centuries to decompose. So this Indian startup is building a sustainable alternative to them using mushrooms…

Pick up any online order that you get. You’ll mostly find plastic packaging in that — sometimes in the form of bubble wrap or maybe some kind of foam.

Even if you dispose of them correctly, they will mostly end up in landfills or will be incinerated.

Roha Biotech is solving this problem. It uses mycelium, aka mushroom roots. They’re sustainable, functional, and readily biodegradable. It then mixes it with agricultural residue, and the result is Mycelium Packaging, which is:

✅ 100% biodegradable.

✅ Plastic-free, chemical-free, and purely natural.

✅ Industrially durable and protective.

It can be used in a range of industries, from personal care to electronics. Unlike plastic, this goes back to nature, leaving behind no trace.

Check out Roha Biotech

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 RecycleSmart: Recycles hard-to-recycle stuff for individuals and businesses.

🇬🇧 AUAR: A complete construction platform for sustainable, high-quality housing.

🇮🇳 Ecoyaan: A sustainable marketplace that uses AI to verify product sustainability claims.

🇬🇧 Buy Me Once: A platform where you’ll only find long-lasting products.

🇨🇭 Bloom Biorenewables: Converts biopolymers like cellulose & lignin into added-value chemical products.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Timber Trouble: Two men in Himachal Pradesh, India, faced hefty fines after locals recorded them illegally cutting down trees in the village forest and exposed their chainsaw operation on social media.

Goodbye Gas: Vietnam will ban gasoline motorcycles in downtown Hanoi starting July 1, 2026, followed by a gradual expansion to include cars and other districts, as part of an emissions reduction initiative.

Climate Crackdown: In a groundbreaking advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice declared climate change an "existential threat," ruling that countries must meet their climate obligations.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend. Taking a break from work next week, so I will see you the week after :)

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Quiz answer: Sweden

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• It All Started With An MBA Project

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: RecycleSmart

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🚌 It All Started With An MBA Project

In 2011, Eva, Alejandro, and Rui were part of the MBA program at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. One of the projects that they were working on as part of their course was to propose an idea that would disrupt a traditional industry.

At that time, Alejandro was also working as the CEO of a third-generation motorcoach operator in Spain. Being aware of how the industry operates, he suggested the “commute to work” problem.

The commute to work is a challenge for companies to solve. Unless you have batches of people coming in and leaving at the same time every day, how can you optimize it?

Add to it factors like hybrid work, door-to-door pickup, and multisite visits, and you can see why the problem is so complicated and, well, unsustainable (from an emissions perspective).

Eva and Rui had experience in innovation and strategic operations consultancy, and agreed that this whole commute to work model can be more efficient. And that’s how their project, “Busit your way” was born.

One thing led to another, and in 2015, these 3 were joined by Danilo, CEO of a Motorcoach Operator in Brazil, to the founding team

And finally, BusUp launched in 2015 with an aim to create more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable shuttle programs.

The brand manages Corporate Mobility Programs with the help of technology.

The company tailors the commute to work program for every company. Whether it’s hybrid or in-person, door-to-door pickup or clubbing employees from different companies into a shared bus route, BusUp has all the solutions.

• This helps to bring down the costs for the company.

• Reduces the stress on employees.

• Brings down the number of cars on the streets.

Making it easy for everyone on the planet.

Check out BusUp

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: RecycleSmart

Recycling is one of the most common ways to get rid of your stuff. But recycling across the world is broken. The recycling systems haven’t been able to keep up with the evolving products and packaging.

They can’t handle stuff like e-waste, textiles, kitchen items, blister packs, batteries, and vapes. So these products end up in landfills and sit there for decades, if not centuries.

RecycleSmart is solving this problem for Australians. It’s making recycling easy and accessible for everyone.

So what can you recycle with them? Well, anything that’s dry and you're not sure what to do with it.

• RecycleSmart picks it up from your home or business

• They then sort all of this tricky waste by hand.

• And works with vetted partners who can recycle or reuse them.

For instance,

♻️ Soft plastics are turned back into oil or asphalt additives.

♻️ Wearable clothes are donated to local charities.

♻️ Gold, silver, copper, and rare earth metals are extracted from your e-waste.

Their only condition: they pick up dry and reasonably clean stuff. No food, no organic, liquid, hazardous, or dangerous materials. That’s fair!

Solving this tricky waste problem is no easy feat.

Check out RecycleSmart

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇮🇳 Jhappi: Helping individuals & institutions to buy & gift more mindfully.

🇮🇳 Onedotfive: Infusing planet-friendly practices like natural dyeing into everyday clothes

🇦🇪 Carbonmark: Scaling climate finance with a global carbon credits marketplace.

🇺🇸 Aircela: A fridge-sized machine that makes gasoline out of thin air.

🇺🇸 Clean Composting: A paper-pulp container designed for quick and easy composting.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🧤 All in one: Sustainable apparel brand Patagonia has integrated its Worn Wear trade-in service into its main website, making it easier to buy and sell used clothes.

⚰️ RIP: A man in Maine, US, was laid to rest in a mushroom casket, instead of wood and concrete that is used in traditional burials.

🐮 A better alternative: Karnataka Milk Federation in India is experimenting with new biodegradable milk packets that break down naturally within 90 days(as opposed to 500 years for a plastic one).

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Quiz answer: Mexico

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• She Asked for a Repair. They Said, “Buy New.”

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Aircela

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🤷🏽‍♀️ She Asked for a Repair. They Said, “Buy New.”

So She Built This Instead.

It started with a favorite pair of pants and a ripped seam.

When Agnes Weber’s go-to trousers gave out, she reached out to the brand, hoping for a quick fix. What she got instead was a generic 10% discount on a new pair.

“That felt so impersonal,” she remembers. “Why didn’t they just help me fix what I already loved?”

That small moment of frustration and disappointment set Agnes on a new path. Instead of buying new, she envisioned a future where brands stood behind their products long after the sale, where repair wasn’t a last resort, but a built-in service.

That’s how MENDED was born: a repair platform that helps fashion brands in the Netherlands and Germany give new life to worn clothes and build stronger connections with their customers.

What started with a single ripped seam has now become a movement.

Through MENDED, brands are turning repair into a premium service that brings people back into stores, builds brand loyalty, and keeps clothes out of landfills.

“Repair isn’t just good for the environment,” Agnes says. “It’s good for business too.”

Check out MENDED

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Aircela

This team has created a fridge-sized machine that turns air and water into real gasoline using renewable electricity.

Aircela is a carbon-capturing machine that, well, captures carbon from the atmosphere and converts it into engine-ready gasoline. All this is done using three ingredients: air, water, and renewable electricity.

Here’s how it works:

• Capturing Carbon from the Air: Aircela’s machine uses a water-based solution containing potassium hydroxide (KOH) to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from ambient air. Air flows through a specially designed chamber where it contacts the liquid sorbent, efficiently capturing CO₂.

• Producing Hydrogen from Water: Using electrolysis, powered by renewable electricity, water (H₂O) is split into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is kept for fuel synthesis; the oxygen is safely released. At the same time, the sorbent used in the capture step is regenerated for reuse, allowing the cycle to run continuously.

• Synthesizing Fuel: The captured CO₂ and hydrogen are combined to create methanol. That methanol is then converted into gasoline through a two-step catalytic process known as methanol-to-gasoline (MTG). The result is fossil-free, engine-ready gasoline, fully compatible with existing engines and infrastructure.

Now, of course, when this gasoline is burned in any internal combustion engine, it releases CO2 again. But since it’s coming from recirculating carbon that was already in the atmosphere, it’s not adding more carbon (or using any fossil fuels to do that).

Aircela could be placed in households, creating a rooftop gas station, or they could be set up in a solar farm, replacing the need to go to gas stations.

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Uluu: Using seaweed to create a plastic alternative.

🇫🇮 Resiclo: Converting plastic waste into new raw materials.

🇫🇷 Poppins: Helping people to borrow or rent stuff from neighbors.

🇮🇳 Roha Biotech: Using mushrooms to create a plastic packaging alternative.

🇬🇧 Buy Me Once: Making it easy to find stuff that lasts.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

1️⃣ Pakistan's Power Play Goes Off-Grid

Facing scorching 120°F heat, soaring bills, and an unreliable grid, Pakistanis aren't waiting for solutions — they're creating them. In just three years, solar energy jumped from 4% to 14% of electricity generation as everyday citizens, from farmers to city dwellers, installed cheap Chinese panels to escape blackouts and cut costs. This grassroots revolution, born of necessity rather than environmental ideology, is transforming lives with reliable cooling, irrigation, and cleaner air (no more diesel generators!).

2️⃣ Riding the Wave: Scotland's Tidal Triumph Makes Quite a Splash!

Off Scotland's coast, a remarkable tidal turbine has been quietly making history, operating continuously underwater for over 6.5 years without a hitch. Part of the MeyGen project, this durability milestone proves tidal energy's viability in harsh conditions. With four turbines already powering about 7,000 homes and plans for 130 more, this predictable clean energy source offers advantages over weather-dependent alternatives.

3️⃣ The Bag-gage Fee That Cleaned Up Town

Plympton, Massachusetts, turned its trash problem into treasure by switching to a "pay-as-you-throw" system that charges per garbage bag, rather than a flat fee. The results were dramatic: trash output nearly halved from 640 to 335 tons annually, saving the town $65,000 and reducing landfill emissions. By making waste costs visible, the system naturally encouraged recycling and composting without unfairly burdening smaller households.

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Quiz answer: Lisbon

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• From an Ad Writer to Fighting Overconsumption

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Vok Bikes

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

From an Ad Writer to Fighting Overconsumption

Tara Button was writing TV ads in the early 2010s. Ads that pushed people to buy new stuff. While writing these ads, she also became an impulsive shopper, buying things that she was writing about — easy to fall into that trap. You or I would probably have done the same things.

On her 30th birthday, Tara’s sister Jules gifted her a Le Creuset cooking pot. If you are coming across Le Creuset for the first time, you’re not alone! It’s a French-Belgian maker of cookware, and its products are meant to last!

Every time Tara used the pot, she had the same feeling:

If only all my possessions were like this, I’d never have to replace anything. In fact, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to trust everything we bought not to let us down and end up as landfill. Think of the environmental benefits!

After pondering over this for months, she built a basic website and decided to call it Buy Me Once. She started reading the fine print behind products and slowly curated a list of products that would last — you buy them once and then just continue using them.

In 2016, a tweet and eventually an article in The Telegraph made Buy Me Once viral enough to convince Tara to leave her full-time job and spread the Buy Me Once mission.

By 2017, the website had 2000 products, and Tara had a book deal with Harper Collins.

Fast forward to today:

• On the website, you would only find long-lasting products that the team can stand behind.

• They examine the products themselves, their manufacturing story, and develop meaningful relationships with the makers before listing the products on the site.

• If they find that a product is not up to scratch, they immediately take it off the website. It also offers exclusive warranties on the products.

Here are some of the cool, durable products I discovered on Buy Me Once:

Check out Buy Me Once

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Vok Bikes

European nations (and North American ones as well) use a lot of vans. These vans have ample cargo capacity and are used for last-mile deliveries, restaurant deliveries, fresh goods supplies, facility management, and are even used by municipalities. But,

66% of these vans operate with less than half of their cargo space used.

They are taking up space in urban centers are creating unnecessary emissions.

The solution:

Vok Bikes are a durable, low-maintenance, and agile alternative to vans. According to the brand, these electric cargo bikes have:

• 44% faster delivery time

• 64% more cost efficient

• 95% less CO₂ than a petrol car

The compact design of the bike makes it easy to park anywhere without blocking traffic, and it can easily navigate through restricted zones as well.

These bikes now operate in 14 European countries and are used by brands like IKEA, which offers Vok bikes for customer rentals in Utrecht and Stockholm.

Solving the urban logistics challenge, one bike at a time!

Check out Vok Bikes

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇬🇧 Elvis & Kresse: Using rescued fire hoses to make bags.

🇫🇮 Stora Enso: Making batteries out of wood.

🇫🇷 Planet of the Grapes: Converting waste from winemaking into bags and belts.

🇺🇸 KENT: World’s first compostable underwear.

🇦🇺 BearHug: Reusable pallet wraps to replace single-use plastic.

😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

• Modhera in Gujarat has become India’s first village fully powered by solar energy day and night, thanks to over 1,300 rooftop panels, solar carports, and a 15 MWh battery system.

• DJI drones are revolutionizing trash collection on Mount Everest by completing in just six minutes what takes Sherpas four hours of dangerous hiking.

• Ranchers in Mexico are transforming from jaguar hunters to conservationists. Through the Viviendo con Felinos program, they now earn thousands of dollars for documenting wild cat sightings on their land around the Northern Jaguar Preserve in Sonora.

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Quiz answer: Switzerland

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• I Was About to Buy Another Pair of Shoes… Then I Tried This

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Uluu

• 5 Brands Creating Low-Waste Cleaning Solutions

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

I Was About to Buy Another Pair of Shoes… Then I Tried This🥾☕

After I am done petting my cats in the morning, I move to making coffee. We have a drip machine, and since both of us love black coffee, it works perfectly for us.

Earlier, a part of the coffee-making process involved discarding the used coffee grounds every morning. But recently, I discovered a practical use for them.

I now put them in my gym shoes.

Currently, it's monsoon season in Goa. My extremely sweaty gym shoes don't get sufficient time to dry before I need to wear them again. One solution was to buy another pair and alternate between the two — a quick and convenient option, I must admit. However, I only use these shoes at the gym and nowhere else. Having two pairs didn't make sense. Plus, I'm trying to minimize my possessions, so this approach didn't align with that philosophy either.

After some quick research, I found a better way to dry those shoes and eliminate that unpleasant odor. You guessed it right — I began putting used coffee grounds in my shoes. But not directly — that would create quite a mess.

There's a process to it. I keep two containers in our kitchen. I empty the used coffee grounds into one of them, and once they dry out, I transfer them to another container. You can't use wet coffee grounds as they won't absorb moisture, and they might replace the sweat smell with a dark roast aroma 😛

Afterward, I place these dried coffee grounds in an old pair of socks (without holes) and put these coffee-filled socks in my shoes overnight.

You can then remove the used coffee grounds, dry them again, and continue the process. These coffee-filled socks can also help eliminate odors from storage boxes and closets, if needed.

Let me know if you've been using your coffee grounds in other creative ways. I would love to experiment.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Uluu

This Australian startup is using seaweed to tackle the plastic crisis…

Plastic Awakening…Dr Julia Reisser was an ecologist and researched sea turtles in her native Brazil. During her research, Julia realized how sea turtles were eating more plastic than anything else. This led her to do a PhD in ocean plastics, followed by a stint at The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch not-for-profit developing technology to remove plastic from the seas, where she was one of the earliest members.

Seaweed Solution…But Julia wanted to move to the source of the problem — plastics. When she did not find any persuasive alternatives to plastics, she decided to create one with Michael Kingsbury, a former business executive and M&A lawyer. Together, they launched Uluu, which is on a mission to make all the world’s plastics out of seaweed.

But why seaweed?

Seaweeds are amazing at restoring our oceans. They not only remove carbon from the atmosphere but also clean up nutrient pollution that causes havoc in our marine environments.

Uluu’s compostable polymer, called polhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), is made through a fermentation process that is similar to brewing beer. This is their 4-step process:

1. Cook seaweed. Extract sugars from seaweed using special enzymes.

2. Ferment PHAs. Feed seaweed sugars to PHA-producing microbes.

3. Extract PHAs. Remove PHAs from inside the microbes.

4. Make pellets. Melt the PHAs to make pellets ready for product manufacturing.

These pellets can be used in industries like fashion, furniture, and packaging.

Sustainable Byproducts…At the end of the process, there’s a leftover seaweed biomass with higher protein content and greater digestibility. ULUU has partnered to use this vegan by-product as an alternative to fishmeal in aquaculture feed. It’s also exploring developments in other areas such as soil treatment, pet food, and protein for human consumption.

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✅ 5 Brands Creating Low-Waste Cleaning Solutions

🇮🇳 Arani Ecosteps- A plastic-free store for personal care and household products.

🇺🇸 Cleancult- Non-toxic household cleaning products that are good for humans and the planet.

🇨🇦 Etee- Cleaning and personal care products in the form of concentrates.

🇨🇦 Myni- Low waste cleaning and personal care products.

🇮🇳 Bare Necessities- Makes low-waste personal, home care & lifestyle products.

😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌳 City Slick-ers: Urban Climate Heroes!

Cities are outperforming national governments in addressing climate change, with 75% of major cities reducing emissions faster than their countries, achieving an average 7.5% drop from 2015 to 2024. Urban leaders are taking practical steps like planting trees, electrifying transit, and improving walkability in direct response to climate threats, though they face a massive funding gap of $4.5 trillion annually needed by 2030 to meet climate goals.

🚲 Wheel-y Making a Difference!

The global Bicycle Mayor Network is revolutionizing urban transit through a grassroots approach where local cycling champions advocate for bike-friendly cities. After learning to ride during the pandemic, Maren Ahlers now leads a 450-member cycling group in Addis Ababa and has joined this 150-member coalition spanning 34 countries. Despite being volunteers facing bureaucratic hurdles, these advocates are achieving tangible results, including Ethiopia's commitment to build 100 kilometers of new bike lanes.

🌊 Making Waves in Conservation

Samoa has made a groundbreaking conservation move by becoming one of the first Pacific Island nations to legally protect 30% of its ocean. They've adopted a binding Marine Spatial Plan that ensures sustainable management of their entire 120,000-square-kilometer ocean territory. Cabinet-endorsed under the Lands, Survey and Environment Act 1989, this plan sets a powerful example for other large ocean states looking to protect their marine resources. Samoa's achievement puts them ahead of schedule for the 2025 UN Ocean Conference targets.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Samsung

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Turning Discarded Construction Debris into Public Furniture

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Repair Rebels

• 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Upcycling Waste

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🏗️ Turning Discarded Construction Debris into Public Furniture

Let’s talk about construction waste — timber beams, concrete chunks, and other salvaged building elements. We are demolishing and building new buildings at a rapid pace, across most cities in the world. As a result, we generate a lot of construction waste. This waste mostly ends up in landfills and sits there for decades or even centuries.

The situation is no different in Stockholm, Sweden. But designer Nicholas Niemen has decided to give this waste a second life, through his project X-TRAKOJAN, which turns discarded construction debris into something beautiful, functional, and meaningful.

Nicholas started by gathering leftover materials from construction sites around Stockholm and assembling these fragments into a striking X-shaped structure

It allows locals and tourists to pause, sit, and connect with their surroundings at Stockholm’s port.

It’s a great example of how art, architecture, and sustainability can come together. These places are also a great conversation starter about how we build, discard, and reuse in our cities.

Something that cities around the world can take a cue from and create their own version of it. Have you seen something similar in your own city?

Leave a comment

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Repair Rebels

Want to fix your clothes, shoes, or bags? This German startup has built a one-stop solution for that…

Fix, Don't Ditch…We live in a linear economy where it’s easy to buy new stuff, use it for sometime and discard it. And then completely forget about it. A more sustainable option is to get our stuff repaired, which increases its life, keeps it out of landfills, and prevents a new product from being manufactured.

Stitch In Time…But repairing isn’t convenient, especially when you compare it to buying new stuff. German startup Repair Rebels is solving this problem by combining tech with traditional craft people, such as tailors, cobblers, and leather workers, who have no digital presence.

Here’s how it works:

🛠️ Customers can book and pay for their repair online.

🛠️ They can then send their products to Repair Rebels.

🛠️ Products are repaired and sent back to them.

Making it convenient for customers while being:

🌝 Good for the planet.

👜 Good for their wallet.

💼 Good for the local economy.

Repair Rebels also works with brands and retailers who are passionate about sustainable fashion.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Upcycling Waste

🇸🇬 WasteX: Helps farmers transform their agricultural waste into a valuable product.

🇳🇴 Wastefront: Converts worn-out tires to other useful products.

🇺🇸 Wastefuel: Transforms municipal solid waste into sustainable aviation fuel.

🇬🇧 Neverwaste: Converts waste cardboard into wooden-looking boards.

🇺🇸 Wasted: Makes recycled fertilizer from the nutrients in your pee instead of letting them go to waste.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🦭 Seal the Deal: The Netherlands' new Wadden Ecomare Centre has opened, replacing the 1971 Pieterburen facility. Led by Sander van Dijk, it treats 200 seals yearly, mostly separated "howler" pups and victims of debris or vessel collisions. The upgraded center houses 70 seals with 12 intensive-care units and uses natural seawater to improve fur health and accelerate wound healing.

🏡 "House Cooling" Effect: In British Columbia, nonprofit housing groups are revolutionizing affordable living by building climate-resilient homes that simultaneously address housing affordability and climate change impacts. With rents as low as $775 and carbon emission reductions up to 90%, these innovative projects provide protection from extreme weather while demonstrating how smart housing policy can serve as a blueprint for cities worldwide.

🌊 Bag Ban Bonanza: A recent study provides compelling evidence that plastic bag bans effectively reduce coastal litter. Researchers found that areas with plastic bag policies showed a 25-47% reduction in plastic bags as a percentage of total litter collected compared to areas without such regulations. Complete bans or fees proved more effective than partial bans, and statewide regulations outperformed local ones.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Ireland

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Country Takes Historic Stand Against Ultra-Fast Fashion

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Tereform

• 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Redefining Fashion

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🚫 This Country Takes Historic Stand Against Ultra-Fast Fashion

There are fast fashion companies like H&M and Zara that are known for launching new designs every week. And then there are ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein and Temu, which offer you more styles every time you refresh your screen. They are essentially fast fashion companies on steroids. Here’s an article that I wrote on ultra-fast fashion around 2 years ago, if you’d like to dive deeper:

What is Ultra-Fast Fashion? And How Can We Avoid It?

France has become the first company to target these ultra-fast fashion giants officially. In June 2025, it passed a bill that introduces eco-taxes, ad bans, and sustainability rules to tackle overconsumption and textile waste from brands like Shein and Temu.

Here’s a breakdown of the bill, which could become a law in September 2025:

1️⃣ Environmental surcharge on fast fashion items:

• Each item sold by ultra-fast fashion would incur a €5 tax, which would increase to €10 by 2030.

• This surcharge would be kept at 50% of the retail price to keep things affordable.

• Revenue from this surcharge would be used to support sustainable French fashion brands.

• This would make their products more affordable and accessible.

2️⃣ A ban on advertising ultra-fast fashion brands

• No advertising on social media platforms — the ban extends to influencer marketing as well, so no more shopping hauls.

• Influencers could face sanctions if they break the rules.

• This would reduce the appeal of ultra-fast fashion and overconsumption.

3️⃣ Retailers need to disclose environmental information with their products

• This includes details like carbon emissions, resource usage, and recyclability.

• All clothes will come with an eco-score.

• The lower the eco-score, the higher the taxation and penalties the brand must pay.

While the bill is a great step in the right direction, all these rules don’t apply to European brands like Zara. I hope it becomes more inclusive in the future.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Tereform

Your clothes contain multiple materials — fabrics, prints, finishes, and dyes. This makes them difficult to recycle. This duo is tackling this challenge.

Thread Alert…Tons of textiles are discarded every second. They mostly end up in landfills or incinerators because they are hard to recycle. That’s because clothes are made of blended material. Pick up any garment and check out its textile label. You would mostly see different materials. A lot of them, like polyester, spandex, and nylon, are actually made of plastic. On top of that, some prints and dyes make recycling even more complicated.

Why Do Clothes End Up in Landfills?

Tereform is solving this problem.

👕 Its recycling technology uses the oxygen in the air and earth-abundant metals.

👕 This breaks down synthetic textiles into their original chemical building blocks.

👕 The end result is the powdered plastic that can be reused.

Thread Ahead…This prevents this plastic from ending up in landfills and reduces the need for new plastic. Tereform is extending this to other industries such as automotive, apparel, and home goods as well, creating an even bigger impact!

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Redefining Fashion

🇺🇸 👖 unspun: Creating low-waste on-demand jeans.

🇩🇪 🪡 Repair Rebels: A one-stop solution to fix your clothes, shoes, and bags.

🇺🇸 🥼 AmorSui: Washable, recyclable, and more sustainable PPE kits.

🇮🇳 🐢 Jiwya: A 100% plant-based slow fashion brand.

🇬🇧🪡 Circulo: Making clothing repair as convenient and easy as buying new clothes.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🍃 A Wing and a Prayer: While wind turbines pose less risk to birds than everyday hazards like windows, they remain a concern for vulnerable species like raptors and seabirds. Scientists and engineers are exploring various solutions, from striped blade painting to AI-powered collision detection, to fix that problem. Some other experts are recommending ideas like strategic site placement and temporary shutdowns during migration periods to reduce bird fatalities.

🪵 Gibbon a Second Chance: In Java, Indonesia, the endangered Javan Gibbon population has dwindled to around 4,000 due to deforestation, hunting, and habitat fragmentation. Local NGO SwaraOwa is tackling this crisis by working with communities to create "forest corridors" — connecting isolated forest patches to help gibbons and other species move freely and find mates, while young farmers in a nearby village are leading reforestation efforts by growing native seedlings.

🚲 Pedal to the Metal(lic Air): Paris has undergone a dramatic transformation under Mayor Anne Hidalgo since 2014, banning cars from over 100 streets and replacing thousands of parking spots with bike lanes. This bike-friendly revolution has paid off significantly, with air pollution levels dropping by approximately 50% compared to 2005 levels.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Pakistan

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• How Solar Panels Are Giving New Life to Birds

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: auum

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌞🦅 How Solar Panels Are Giving New Life to Birds

Solar energy isn’t just good for the grid — it’s turning out to be a lifeline for wildlife. Across Germany, solar parks are quietly transforming into biodiversity hotspots, with birds like larks, wagtails, and wheatears thriving among the panels. In places where intensive farming has pushed species to the edge, these fenced, low-disturbance areas are offering a second chance.

Take one of Germany’s largest solar parks near Berlin, for example. Biologist Matthias Stoefer counted record-breaking numbers of breeding larks there—up to 47 pairs per 10 hectares.

That’s more than six times the number found on nearby farmland, where constant spraying and harvesting leave little room for successful nesting. What’s even more surprising is that larks usually avoid vertical structures.

But here, the orderly rows of panels don’t seem to faze them.

These parks are doing more than just sitting there and soaking up the sun. Sheep graze between the rows, keeping the grass short and fertilizing the land naturally.

This creates a rich buffet of insects for the birds and fosters a mosaic of microhabitats — from sandy trails to shady green patches under the panels.

Over time, with minimal human interference and careful management, these areas become surprisingly rich ecosystems.

And it's not just larks.

Rare birds like the wheatear are showing up again, along with buntings, shrikes, and even red kites circling overhead. As solar parks mature, they quietly outdo neighboring agricultural land in terms of wildlife value.

With the right design and care, solar parks can pull double duty — clean energy above, thriving biodiversity below. Who knew saving the planet could come with birdsong?

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: auum

This machine makes it easier for office employees to reuse their cups and glasses.

A lot of companies still use disposable cups. An office employee has ~2-3 drinks per day. Now, consider a mid-sized company office of 100 employees. That would be 200-300 cups a day and around 60-90k disposable cups in a year. And that’s just one company. Multiply it by hundreds of thousands of companies across the world, and the problem becomes huge!

One of the solutions could be employees bringing their reusable cups, but…

😫 Cleaning a mug at work is a chore.

😫 Who wants to empty a dishwasher at work?

😫 You probably have to use a toilet sink to wash your mug.

auum is solving this problem by making reusing simple. It has built a device that can clean, disinfect, and dry a glass in just 20 seconds. The device uses

💦 10 cl (3,4 oz) of water.

❌ And no chemicals.

Instead, it has built a patented technology that uses dry steam heated at 140°c (284°F). This makes cleaning simple, fun, and instant.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇺🇸 BeBot: A fully electric robot that can scan beaches for debris and remove it much faster than manual beach cleanups.

🇸🇪 Zivi: A car wash service that uses a sustainable waterless technique that uses only ~0.5 liters per wash.

🇺🇸 InventWood: Invented a new type of wood that’s stronger than steel.

🇮🇳 Boson Whitewater: Tackling water scarcity through transforming treated sewage water into potable water.

🇺🇸 Ground Control Robotics: Built a centipede-inspired robot that can go to any type of terrain to remove weeds.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

1️⃣ 🌡️ India's Big AC Energy Efficiency Push: India is taking a bold step to reduce energy consumption by mandating temperature limits on air conditioners. The government plans to restrict AC temperatures between 20-28°C, a significant change from the current minimum of 16°C. This initiative could lead to impressive energy savings — about 6% for each degree increase. With India's booming AC market of 1.4 million units sold last year, this regulation targets both households and commercial spaces. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency supports this move, particularly recommending 24°C as the ideal temperature for comfort.

2️⃣ 🌳 Colombia Makes Strides in Forest Protection: Colombia has achieved impressive progress in its fight against deforestation, with a significant 33% reduction in forest loss during Q1 2025. Deforestation dropped from 40,219 hectares to 27,000 hectares year-over-year, with the Amazon's national parks showing the most improvement. The government is also working on strengthening ties with Indigenous and territorial leaders to further boost conservation efforts.

3️⃣ 🌞 India's Clean Energy Revolution: India is transforming its energy landscape at an impressive pace. While still heavily dependent on coal, the country is actively shifting towards renewable energy, with coal's share in power capacity dropping from 60% to under 50% in just 11 years. In a remarkable achievement, India added 30 gigawatts of clean power between April 2024 and 2025 — enough to power 18 million homes. This transition is crucial, as India's growing middle class and increasing energy demands make it a key player in the global fight against climate change.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Decathlon